Picking a license

[Paul Boddie]

On 9 Mai, 21:55, Patrick Maupin <pmau... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On May 9, 12:08 pm, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
>
> > Oh sure: the GPL hurts everyone, like all the companies who have made
> > quite a lot of money out of effectively making Linux the new
> > enterprise successor to Unix, plus all the companies and individuals
> > who have taken the sources and rolled their own distributions.
>
> So, people overstate their cases to make their points.  That happens
> on both sides.

Overstate their cases? The "GPL hurts everyone" is a flat-out
falsehood.

> > It's not worth my time picking through your "holy war" rhetoric when
> > you're throwing "facts" like these around. As is almost always the
> > case, the people who see the merit in copyleft-style licensing have
> > clearly given the idea a lot more thought than those who immediately
> > start throwing mud at Richard Stallman because people won't let them
> > use some software as if it originated in a (universally acknowledged)
> > public domain environment.
>
> No, you appear to have a kneejerk reaction much worse than Carl's.
> You have assumed you fully understand the motives of people who point
> out issues with the GPL, and that those motives are uniformly bad, and
> this colors your writing and thinking quite heavily, even to the point
> where you naturally assumed I was defending all of Apple's egregious
> behavior.

I skimmed your post in that particular case and apologised for doing
so.

How have I not understood the motives of people who do not like the
GPL? The GPL sets out a number of conditions on the use of a
particular work; these conditions are not liked by some people
typically because it means that they cannot use that work as part of a
proprietary product or solution, just as the authors of the licence
intended; various people would prefer that authors license their works
permissively, precisely because this lets them use such works in
proprietary software; some of the rhetoric employed to persuade people
to permissively license their work involves phrases like "more
freedom" (which are subjective at best, although never acknowledged as
such) or the more absurd "holy war", evidently.

I once attended a talk by someone from the FSF Europe, a few years ago
now, where the inevitable assertion that the BSD licences were "more
free" was made by an audience member. In my experience, such people
are very reluctant to acknowledge the different philosophical
dimensions of "freedom", whereas people who apply copyleft licences to
their works have typically had to confront such issues even before
being asked over and over again to relicense them.

> As far as my throwing mud at Stallman, although I release some open
> source stuff on my own, I make a living writing software that belongs
> to other people, and Stallman has said that that's unethical and I
> shouldn't be able to make money in this fashion.  Sorry, but he's not
> on my side.

A lot of people seem to take issue with the GPL because they don't
like Stallman, but that only leads to their judgement being clouded as
a consequence. When Stallman's warnings become fulfilled, as has been
the case with things like BitKeeper, this only serves to infuriate
people further, often because they know they could have ignored the
messenger but should not have ignored the message. Most people writing
software are doing so for other people, and many people are doing so
as part of a proprietary process. Thus, the only way to interpret what
Stallman has to say (should you not wish to reject it completely) is
to consider it as some kind of absolute guidance, not some kind of
personal judgement.

> > P.S. And the GPL isn't meant to further the cause of open source: it's
> > meant to further the Free Software cause, which is not at all the same
> > thing. Before you ridicule other people's positions, at least get your
> > terminology right.
>
> And, again, that's "free" according to a somewhat contentious
> definition made by someone who is attempting to frame the debate by co-
> opting all the "mother and apple pie" words, who is blindly followed
> by others who think they are the only ones who are capable of thoughts
> which are both rational and pure.  I'm not saying everybody who uses
> the GPL is in this category, but some of your words here indicate that
> you, in fact, might be.

No, I am saying that the Free Software movement is a well-defined
thing - that's why the name uses capital letters, but it could be
called the "Planet of the Zebras movement" for all the name should
reasonably distract from what the movement is actually about - and
that it has a very different agenda from the "open source" movement
which advocates very similar licensing on the basis of things like
higher software quality and other "pragmatic" consequences of using
such licensing.

As for the terminology, I've already noted that I prefer the term
"privileges" to "rights" or "freedoms" because it communicates that
something is gained. Again, some people assume that the natural state
of a work is (or should be) a free-for-all and that the GPL revokes
privileges: this is a misrepresentation of how copyright and licensing
functions.

Paul